Review of WALL·E (2008) by Henry P — 25 Sep 2015

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Axiom. Its five year mission: To not explore any kind of new world, to not seek out new life or start a new civilization (On purpose), to cowardly go where hippies will be appeased: Wall-E.

Before I go on, I just want to get out of the way that I do believe its messages are overly cynical. However, after you tell the kids this is not too likely to happen on account of the fact we would have to try to mess up the planet that bad, and that if we were truly heading that way, we would seek out new life and new civilization like Star Trek's starship Enterprise, as well as just find a new homeworld on a Class M (Earth-type) planet instead of wasting away like that, Wall-E is very lovable (Just my two cents).

But it is just not realistic: Humanity is not apathetic enough to end up like people in this movie do. Before getting there, we start with a day in the life of Wall-E (Ben Burtt, for those who don't know, he created the sounds of Star Wars), a robot in charge of cleaning Earth up.

He's a curious robot, not the droid you're looking for in our time, but not so far away from being human at heart (Operating core?), but in the end, one should not try relating too much to a machine.

After centuries of the same old thing, compacting garbage and taking interesting relics, something finally happens: The Axiom's annual recon mission to Earth. This unites him with Eve (Elissa Knight), and after courting her and showing Eve his collection, she takes a radical interest in a plant MacGuffin Wall-E discovered, and after confiscating it, Wall-E tries courting a sleep mode Eve, resulting in his hitchhiking on her return ship to the Axiom, and gets acquainted with a wide variety of new robots, and (gasp) humans, who look a little grotesque, but are actually what happens when humanity grows too dependent on machines, and they ignore their surroundings (Physical ones, not virtual).

However grotesque the humans are, you gotta admire the beauty of everybody's favorite final frontier, which shows how dedicated to picture quality Pixar is. What follows on the heels of Wall-E's intrusion is a series of events that will change the course of humanity for the first time since they went into space: A fight for their return to Earth.

Thomas Newman returns for soundtrack duty after five years away from the imagination-nation of Pixar, inhales the robotic aura of Wall-E, and aided by old-timey music (which I guess is used ironically, but is otherwise compelling) with a healthy dose of silence, exhales a more human aura with music that keeps me from throwing this one into the Wall-E compactor for its cynical message.

I also found the character of Wall-E, developed through the time spent on Earth with just him and later Eve, via his R2-D2 style quirks from collecting random garbage, to his not-so-robotic personality.

This love is the kind of love you can only feel for a Pixar character: Beyond anything most movie characters make you feel. The underlying message may be cynical, but superficially, Wall-E is a lovable, character-driven film.